Beryl Bainbridge: last masterpiece of an obsessive

When Beryl Bainbridge died in 2010, the novel that had dominated her final
decade remained unfinished. We offer an exclusive preview of 'The Girl in
the Polka Dot Dress’, a haunting account of a road trip across America that
coincides with the assassination of Robert F Kennedy.
Below, Lorna Bradbury tells the story of Bainbridge’s last days

The obituaries that followed Beryl Bainbridge’s death from cancer last July paid tribute to her masterfully desolate novels, which totalled 18; her gregarious persona and legendary drinking capacity; and the famously eccentric house in Camden, north London, complete with a stuffed buffalo in the hallway, where she spent the last 50 years of her life.

They also offered a tantalising glimpse of the novel Bainbridge was writing over her last decade, and which she fell just short of completing before she died.

Though it hinges on a moment of historical drama, the assassination of Robert F Kennedy in a Los Angeles hotel in 1968, it is remarkable how closely it is modelled on Bainbridge’s life. It is a return to her earlier way of writing, which drew heavily on autobiography, principally her difficult upbringing in Formby and her relationship with the father she plotted to kill from the age of 10.

The novel is based on a three-week road trip Bainbridge took in a camper van across the United States in May 1968, which she recorded in a contemporaneous diary. This diary, highlights of which will be published in The Sunday Telegraph tomorrow, details thoughts and sketches from her journey from Washington to San Francisco, into which news of Kennedy’s death bursts like a flame.

It contains snippets of overheard conversations and observations about American society and politics. We hear about her increasingly strained relationship with Harold, her travelling companion, whom she met through American friends in London, and the privations of weeks spent on the road – much of which is worked into her novel.

The diary also contains notes of anxiety about the three young children she abandoned at home, and reflections on the exquisiteness of her new love affair with a painter, Don McKinlay.

The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress is structured, as was often the case for Bainbridge, as a thriller, with the reader lured onwards with the mystery of what it is that connects Washington Harold, as he is known in the novel, with Rose, the Bainbridge character – and what links both of them to the Kennedy shooting.

Rose becomes the girl in the polka dot dress who was reported to have been seen running away from the hotel where Kennedy was shot. If these key narrative devices have been superimposed onto Bainbridge’s story as found, then the mood of the relationship between Harold and Rose seems to come directly from life.

The journalist and historian AN Wilson, who was a friend of Bainbridge, says she was obsessed with her final novel. “Why she didn’t finish it was a psychological mystery,” he says. “I don’t know what was stopping her. It went far beyond writer’s block.”

Brendan King, who helped to edit Bainbridge’s manuscripts for 20 years, thinks the problem was that she had used up so much autobiographical material in her earlier books. She had been writing a JB Priestley-inspired novel about different concepts of time, but felt it wasn’t working. She had also tried to write about the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

It was only when she uncovered the diary of her 1968 road trip that her writing was liberated. Some of the material from her homage to Priestley apparently made its way barely changed into this new novel.

Having recovered from breast cancer in 2006, and despite the emphysema that dogged her latterly, Bainbridge had been in reasonable health in her last few years and had worked hard to finish the book. But then it became clear that time would not be on her side.

Melvyn Bragg, the broadcaster and novelist, who visited Bainbridge in hospital in the last few days of her life, says she was insistent that all she needed was 30 days. “She was at the centre of tentacles of tubes,” he says. “She was anguished, exasperated, but very coherent. She said she had it all worked out, and could I fix it that she get 30 days?”

She summoned King up from the Isle of Wight to help, and he proposed a way of making the novel cohere should she not have time to finish it. “I left her with the pages I proposed shifting to the end,” he says. “But the next day she had a relapse. She died a few days later.”

The question we are left with now, given Bainbridge’s struggle with the novel and the fact that it remained unfinished at her death, is whether or not it holds up.

And the consensus is that, despite the acute anxiety that marked its conception, the prose is as crisp and as darkly atmospheric as in Bainbridge’s earlier novels. And though it was put together posthumously by King, it is absolutely in Bainbridge’s voice. King did not have to introduce new material, but moved the opening narrative flashback to the end of the novel to give it a sense of closure. He ironed out repetitions by stitching together material from Bainbridge’s earlier drafts.

King says that The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress should be seen as a flawed masterpiece, simply because Bainbridge was taken from us before she could bring it to the conclusion she had so clearly worked out. If we will never know what ingenious ending she might have crafted had she been given a little more time, we can say for sure that line by line this book is none the less a fitting final chapter.